Who we are
Lateral Economics is a network of professionals with a wealth of experience and expertise in economic reform and public policy. We draw on a range of people from a range of professional backgrounds to meet clients’ needs.
Our principals are:
Nicholas Gruen
Lateral Economics’ CEO Nicholas Gruen is a widely published policy economist, entrepreneur and commentator. He has advised Cabinet Ministers, sat on Australia’s Productivity Commission and founded Lateral Economics and Peach Financial.
He was formerly Visiting Professor at Kings College London and Adjunct Professor at UTS. He chaired the Open Knowledge Foundation (Australian Chapter) and is Patron of the Australian Digital Alliance, which brings together Australia’s libraries, universities, and major providers of digital infrastructure such as Google and Yahoo.
He was Chair of The Australian Centre for Social Innovation until 2016 and Chair of the Australian Government’s principal innovation advisory body, Innovation Australia, until 2014.
He was second shareholder and Chairman of successful San Francisco based startup, data analytics crowdsourcing platform Kaggle, subsequently acquired by Google in March 2017. He is an angel investor in various other Australian and international startups including Halaxy, SmileyScope, Cadence AI, Phoria, Lendable and Confido.
He was a member of a review of pharmaceutical patent extensions in 2013. In 2009, he chaired Australia’s internationally acclaimed Government 2.0 Taskforce. In 2008, he was a member of a major review into Australia’s Innovation System.
He has a BA (Hons – First Class) in History (1981) and a PhD in Public Policy from the ANU (1998), and an LLB (Hons) from the University of Melbourne (1982).
Alex Coram
Alex Coram is Professor (Emeritus) at the University of Western Australia. He was previously Winthrop Professor of Political Economy at the University of Western Australia and professor of economics at the Aberdeen Business School. He has held the Helen Sheridan chair in Economics at the University of Massachusetts and is a visiting fellow at the University of Massachusetts.
He has worked for the Department of Infrastructure in Victoria on models of city development and on providing training programmes for senior management. He has consulted for law firms on problems of contracting. He has also consulted on energy problems and nuclear power.
He specialises in solving non-standard mathematical problems, particularly those involving applications of optimisation theory to problems in:
public sector management
institutional design
optimal contracting
the dynamics of energy systems and
environmental problems.
He has published two books and approximately 50 papers.
He is currently working on problems of nuclear energy and the dynamics of energy use under constraints imposed by emissions reduction.
Gene Tunny
Gene Tunny is a Senior Associate of Lateral Economics. Additionally, Gene is an adjunct lecturer in economics at Griffith University, an adjunct fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, and President of the Economic Society of Australia (QLD). He is a former Australian Treasury official who has managed teams in the Treasury’s Industry and Budget Policy divisions. Before working for the Treasury, Gene was an adviser in Workplace Health and Safety Queensland. He has worked as a consulting economist since 2009.
Over the last seven years, Gene has worked with Dr Gruen on major economic research projects for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Services Australia, the Insurance Council of Australia, and many other clients. Gene is a regular economics commentator in Australian media, and he hosts the popular Economics Explored podcast.